Damage done by water leaks causes millions of dollars of damage to buildings each year. The prior art includes leak detector systems to detect leaks and indicate them locally or remotely. To further enhance such detector systems a remotely operated valve is envisioned.
In a typical residential or small commercial water supply configuration, each building may include a manually operated water shut-off valve located in the incoming water line, hot water tank or other water lines. Although electrically operated valves are available, removing the existing manual shut-off valve and replacing it with a commercially available electrically operated valve incurs considerable inconvenience and expense, and when age of piping is a factor can involve the replacement of more than just the valve. Furthermore, in some instances such electrically operated valves cannot be manually overridden, which is desirable in the event of complete power failure or failure of the valve drive system.
Therefore, there is recognized a need in the art to provide a retrofittable electric valve operating mechanism which can be quickly and easily attached to an existing manual valve configuration while still allowing the manual feature of the valve to be utilized. A need also exists for an electric valve configuration which includes a certain degree of "slop" which can accommodate valve handle misalignment.
A need also exists for a valve operating system which can be used with a leak detection system.